A Portlet Interface for Computational Electromagnetics on the Grid

Grid-enabled portals are becoming increasingly popular for scientific collaboration. Specifically, a portal can be viewed as a Grid-based problem-solving environment (PSE) that allows scientists to access distributed resources, and to monitor and execute distributed Grid applications from a Web browser. This paper describes the Grid-enabled GECEM portal, which serves as a web gateway to computational grids to access remote data files and remote grid services. The portal allows trusted users seamless access to computational resources and grid services, providing a userfriendly computing environment that takes advantages of the underlying Globus Toolkit middleware. The portal is built on GridSphere, which provides support for Grid-based computing. We have developed portlets to retrieve data, invoke grid services, and monitor job submission. We will demonstrate the use of GSI security, the resource registry, and credential management to support secure job submission. We also demonstrate the use of grid services to support migration of executables to remote sites. In this paper, we will present our experiences of developing our portal using GridSphere. We will present both ongoing work and planned future work for the project. The portal has been applied to electromagnetics; however, it can also be applied to other application domains. Keywords— Computational Electromagnetics, Portlets, Grid Services.